When to Use Nofollow vs. Dofollow Links on Your Own Site?

Digital Marketing
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Until now, we’ve discussed nofollow and dofollow links in terms of someone else linking to your site. But sometimes you might want to leverage the nofollow attribute when you link out to third-party sites.

For example, advertising, sponsored blog posts, text link ads, and other links that result from paid relationships should use the nofollow attribute. That helps make it clear to Google that you’re not trying to game the system with a [link scheme

Additionally, any content that potentially could be considered “untrusted” should also use the nofollow attribute for links. This should include comments, if you allow them on your site. (A [WordPress plugin can help you manage nofollow links for WordPress sites.)

How to Make a Link Nofollow

Let’s say you’ve accepted a sponsored post on your blog. To add the nofollow attribute to links within the article, you need to modify the code:

  1. In your blog editor, switch to the HTML view so you can edit code directly.
  2. Find the link you want to make nofollow.
  3. Add the nofollow attribute so it looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Example anchor text
To check a page manually, view the page source. In the Chrome browser, for example, click the View menu and then mouse over Developer. Next, choose View Source. In the new window that opens, you’ll see the source code for the page you’re on. Search on the page for nofollow. (Type Ctrl F to open a search bar, then enter “nofollow.” If that word is used on the page, it will be highlighted for you. To check all links, you can instead search “a href” and look over the links to see which ones contain that nofollow tag)